PlayStation Portable Chip Details

boarder8925 writes "The Register posted an article today that detailed the PlayStation Portable's chip specs. The CPU will run at up to 333MHz, and its frontside bus at up to 166MHz. The graphics system, operating across a 512-bit bus, will be capable of rendering 664m pixels per second and 35m polygons per second. Its core, operating at 166MHz, will include 2MB integrated buffer DRAM."

I Bet...

[FlipmodePlaya]

"Sony will also build in a dedicated security engine, which it *hopes* will eliminate game piracy and attempts to hack the system." (emphasis mine)

Oh, just like with the PS2 and PS1, right? Even the GBA has a flash card you can use to play ROMs and NES games. I understand that they need to be able to say they put effort into preventing piracy, I just found it funny they had hope.

90nm fab

[Andy_R]

I'm a little surprised at this statistic, when the PS3's cell chip is supposed to be 65nm fabbed.

Re:90nm fab

[sammaffei]

Yeah, seems IBM still has some problems making 90nm G5s. Apple had to hold back that G5 iMac because of that.

Re:NetBSD, here we come!

[gl4ss]

probability for sony to allow 3rd party apps: 0%.

sad truth. if you want to code for a portable there's plenty around already though, zaurus, palms, pocketpc's, mobile phones, gp32..

(gba doesn't count, you can't officially create your own apps)

Re:90nm fab

[mausmalone]

Sony's got a habit of boasting about their products before releasing them at lower specs.

I still have the articles that claim the PS2 is capible of over 130 million polygons/second (66 million in the CPU and 75 million in the emotion engine). In game, it's really closer to 5-10 million polygons/sec depending on the quality and special effects. For those of you not following specs, 5-10 million polys/sec in game is extremely respectable, but 130 million is absolutely unheard-of. X-Box and Gamecube both get around 10-30 million/sec depending (heavily) on quality and effects... faster by virtue of being newer.

Now, given their claim of 35 million polys/sec, and Sony's knack for boasting, you'll probably only see 1-5 million/sec (many developers will take advantage of the power stepping and opt for lower detail for longer battery life). For comparrison's sake, the PS1 was able to do something like 300 thousand polys/sec, so the detail level will be very significant for a portable device.

Odd that they'd boast the fill rate, though. At a resolution that low (compared to PC resolutions), it really shouldn't be an issue at all. The only way that would really matter is if they have a ton of texture combiners and pipelines, which wasn't explicitly stated. Should be neat to see this thing in action.

Forget the media

[jaaron]

Don't forget Sony is using their "minidisc' media (or whatever they call it). That's going to be spinning an awful lot for loading and such. I think that will be the biggest drain of all.

Have you ever used a minidisc player? They have incredible battery life. My old minidisc player can last days before I need to recharge the batteries and that's with playing it most of the time.

As most of the other comments and articles point out the media IO is not going to be as big as a drain as powering the screen and the rest of the CPU.